Topologies of Regional Cinema: Philippine, Mindanaon, and Southeast Asian Films

This PhD by Publication investigates the entanglements of national and regional cinema formations. It explores the potential of peripheral regional cinema imaginaries and proposes a topological approach to film research, interpretation, and curation informed by the geographical concepts of place and scale. The national and regional contexts addressed are Philippine, Mindanao, and Southeast Asian cinemas.

The portfolio comprises (1) my book, The End of National Cinema: Filipino Film at the Turn of the Century (2016), which interrogates the significance and limitations of the national cinema paradigm and the ramification of placemaking films in forming imaginaries beneath and beyond the nation-state; (2) three essays—“Tu Pug Imatuy: Small Film, Global Connections” (2019), “Allegories of Scale: On Three Films Set in Mindanao” (2021), “Topos, Historia, Islas: Film Islands and Regional Cinemas” (2021)—that conceptualise regional cinema by centring on films made or set in Mindanao; and (3) three film programmes, This Land Is Ours (2019), Cinematic Counter-Cartographies of Southeast Asia (2021), and LUMAD (2021), curated with activist intentions, concretising the micro- and macro-regional contexts of Mindanao films in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

The submission is methodologically attentive to placemaking, scale mapping, and topological thinking. It demonstrates how they facilitate a process-oriented, openended, and comparative understanding of contemporary regional cinema sensitive to the volatile politics of (national) inclusion, marginalisation, and exclusion, the contradictions of one’s practice vis-à-vis one’s location, and the possibilities of solidarity and collaboration within and across borders.